3D watermarking in the context of video games

This paper proposes a novel digital watermarking algorithm for 3D mesh models that, while developed with focus on video games, operates on a generalized mesh model representation. It combines spectral mesh compression with modifications of the vertex norm distribution in the spatial domain. Furthermore, it uses an optimizer based on evolutionary strategies in order to find the best embedding for the individual 3D model and watermark message. The proposed method is a blind or oblivious watermarking scheme and the embedding is dependent on a secret key. Results from a currently top-selling video game show that the proposed scheme provides satisfactory robustness against various transformations while also retaining good visual quality.